Articles Tagged "Kenneth P. Green"

The Mayans reportedly forecast the world would end this Dec. 21 or at least the present era would. Modern doomsayers, though, tend to be less specific.

In a New York Times Op-Ed piece last week, top U.S. global-warming activist James Hansen predicted that if Canada proceeded to exploit the oil in its vast tarsands reserves and America did nothing, it would be "game over" for the climate.

Game over? Yes, sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities, the demo-addicted NASA scientist insisted, and global temperatures would become intolerable.

"Twenty to 50 per cent of the planet's species would be driven to extinction," he said. "Civilization would be at risk."

Updated by Kenneth P. Green

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, The Case Against Global-Warming Skepticism, California Berkeley physicist Richard A. Muller describes the results from a recent re-examination of climate records and declares the debate is finally, really, truly over.

Skepticism, Muller explains, may have been warranted before (how generous of him!), but now that the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project folks have worked over the temperature data again, there’s no more cause for skepticism about whether or not the globe has warmed.

Warming Red Herring - and Five Real Questions

Muller is right about the globe warming, but his framing of the debate is a red herring: arguments over climate change are not about whether one accepts or “denies” that the climate has warmed in recent years.

In fact, as I’ve been explaining to some colleagues and friends today, the proponents of urgent action on climate change like to conflate five separate questions into one question in order to tag their opponents as being “unscientific,” “deniers,” “flat-earthers,” etc.

Here are the five key questions that Muller and any critic of so-called climate skepticism must confront:

Q1: How has the global average temperature changed in recent history?

Q2: How much of that change is attributable to human activities, and how much to a given activity?

Q3: What can we expect to happen to the climate in the future?

Q4: How will those predicted changes affect people in the future?

Q5: What should we do today in response to Q1–Q4?

In the aftermath of the Copenhagen Climate conference, it is clear that the United Nations-driven process is a bust, and that any similar process requiring economic suicide and massive wealth transfers will go nowhere. It is long since time to drop this charade, take the question of climate change out of the hands of the U.N., and implement more reasonable policies.

Fostering the resilience of societies around the world in case climate disaster strikes would be a start. Central to this process is for governments to stop making things worse, as they do when they subsidize risk-taking.

One reason that predicted damages from rising sea-levels and more powerful storms are so high is because of the popularity of coastal locales for high-density business and upscale residential development. As a result, damages from extreme coastal weather events have been fantastically expensive. The damages from Hurricane Katrina for example, reached over $150 billion. The question, however, is why there was so much value that was so badly protected against completely predictable events? Why were levees and sea-walls so under-designed? Why were so many houses and businesses uninsured? As Charles Perrow observes in "The Next Catastrophe," "Even in areas known to be hazardous, only about 20% of homeowners purchase flood insurance, and less than 50% of businesses purchase flood and earthquake insurance in risky areas."

Responses to "Climategate"--the leaked e-mails from Britain's University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit -- remind me of the line "Are your feet wet? Can you see the pyramids? That's because you're in denial."

Climate catastrophists like Al Gore and the UN's Rajendra Pachauri are downplaying Climategate: it's only a few intemperate scientists; there's no real evidence of wrongdoing; now let's persecute the whistleblower. In Calgary, the latest fellow trying to use the Monty Python "nothing to see here, move along" routine is Prof. David Mayne Reid, who penned a column last week denying the importance of Climategate.

Unfortunately for Reid, old saws won't work in the Internet age: Climategate has blazed across the Internet, blogosphere, and social networking sites. Even environmentalist and writer George Monbiot has recognized that the public's perception of climate science will be damaged extensively, calling for one of the Climategate ringleaders to resign.

As people continue to resist draconian greenhouse gas control schemes that would virtually re-order society around energy rationing and technocratic authoritarianism, proponents of such an eco-revolution are ratcheting up the rhetoric of hate.

People such as James Hansen and Al Gore have long been at the forefront of slandering those who oppose them. As my colleague and I wrote in “Scenes from the Climate Inquisition”:

Anyone who does not sign up 100 percent behind the catastrophic scenario is deemed a “climate change denier.” Distinguished climatologist Ellen Goodman spelled out the implication in her widely syndicated newspaper column last week: “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.” One environmental writer suggested last fall that there should someday be Nuremberg Trials - or at the very least a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission - for climate skeptics who have blocked the planet’s salvation.